P#21: Finding the Rebel in the Parakeets

To the Beat of a Different Drum...

Bryan Peterson: This picture with the parakeets was just good ol' dumb luck. I was back in Singapore on another trip doing a job down there. I took an afternoon off to go to a bird singing contest. That's where many of the people in Singapore show up with these little birds that they hang in coffee shops -- an outdoor coffee shop kind of venue.

There's actually bird singing contests that go on. They're judged accordingly and win prizes. At this particular location, right next to where the contest was being held, there was an actual bird market. (click the image for a larger version)

It was the color of the parakeets that drew my eye to them, and subsequently I went up very close to the cage and shot at about f5.6 if I recall correctly with that 70-180mm. This allowed me to not capture the actual bars of the foreground of the cage that I was shooting through because the depth of field was limited considerably and I managed to fill the frame up with those parakeets.

What made it more interesting was the parakeet in the middle, who clearly is showing all the correct signs of obstinacy. It's like a group shot but you all have that one person that wants to stick their butt out so you're not posed.

Photographically speaking, it was not my intent at the time. I was just being my spontaneous self at that particular moment and letting things happen. I didn't really notice it until a few months later when I had a chance to put together a bunch of material to send off to Corbis..

They immediately seized on that image and several others from that particular shoot and put them up at their agency, on their website. It's done remarkably well. I had no idea, I'll be very honest with you, at the time when I shot that. I thought it looked cute.

But as it turns out, one of the most successful usages of that shot was used by an ad agency in Minneapolis when they did a campaign and talked about the rebel in all of us. In this case, they're referring to the one parakeet that is clearly a rebel. He doesn't march to the sound of the same drum.

When I saw that, I thought, "Oh, I never saw that idea before but yeah, that's a good idea."

To Conclude

Sometimes you don't realize what a gem a photograph is until later. That's exactly how it worked in this amusing shot of these parakeets.